System components

The system comprises:

1. A practice area

2. An exercise library

3. A ring or box of note cards, your Zettelkasten with one or more notes for each “exercise-session”

4. One special Zettel, your focus list

Practice area

You’ll need a dedicated practice area. Make it as distraction-free as possible. The corner of a room suffices, but everything you need should always be out and ready to go. Make it as comfortable as possible, so that it’s someplace you want to be.

Phone apps work for the timer and metronome, but dedicated hardware is better (switching between apps on your phone can be distracting, and sometimes you want to record yourself with a metronome).

I like to have both a wall calendar and a clock visible at a glance (though again, your phone suffices).

Exercise library

The exercise library contains a list proficiency-tests/drills/exercises. You can create your own or simply use the ones provided here. Each drill in the library should include complete documentation on how to perform the exercise, proficiency criteria, examples, etc.

The exercise library contains everything you might ever want to practice more than once. You should create new exercises whenever you stumble across something interesting in a book, magazine, online course, video, or even a conversation with a band-mate.

The library will grow without bound, so make it easy to add (and insert) new exercises.

Every exercise/drill/proficiency-test must have a short ID. You’ll reference the IDs from your Zettelkasten cards, so we use short IDs rather than titles. Writing out long titles gets old in a hurry.

Exercises are often hierarchical. It’s common, for example, to have a master proficiency test (like “demonstrate proficiency locating notes on the fretboard”) with several sub-drills or sub-sub drills (like “find natural notes on the E string” or “practice finding notes with octave shapes”).

I recommend a Zettelkasten naming style for IDs, e.g.: …, RT9, RT9a, RT9b, RT9C, RT9C1, RT9C1a, RT9C1b, RT9C2, RT9D, RT10, etc. This allows easy insertion of new drills into an existing hierarchy while still keeping related drills close together (you can go wide or go deep as required).

This site contains my master list of drills, and you’re welcome to use it, but you should also maintain your own library of exercises as well. All of my exercise IDs are prefixed “RT”. Use a different prefix for the exercises in your library.

A simple three-ring notebook with a new page for each exercise suffices for your own library, but if you’re at all technically inclined, I highly recommend an electronic library, since you’ll almost certainly want to link to videos, images, tabs/sheet-music, and other media.

A folder of Microsoft Word or Google Docs documents should work.

My suggestion is to use markdown files on github with github-pages.

Markdown allows you to easily link to videos, diagrams, tabs, etc. as required without losing focus on the content you’re creating. Git and github make version control and backup simple and automatic. Github-pages makes it trivial to publish your library on the internet if you so desire.

One note about IDs: don’t worry too much about getting them right, and avoid the temptation to change any existing exercise’s ID. It’s just a label in the end, and it doesn’t matter that much if things aren’t perfectly ordered.

Zettelkasten

Background

The history of Zettelkasten is fascinating. A ridiculously prolific sociologist (58 books and hundreds of articles, many classics in their field) named Niklas Luhman developed the system.

Luhman created a lifelong note-taking system for academics. Zettel apparently means “note” in German, and Kasten means “box”. Zettelkasten is just a teutonically prescriptive way to take notes. It allows you to keep related notes close together and organized in hierarchies. I found this summary of how to use Zettelkasten quite helpful.

I just want to make my guitar practice as efficient as possible, but many of Luhman’s ideas seem directly applicable.

Luhman’s system appeals to me expressly because it only uses handwritten notes on simple index cards. I also like the smaller form factor of cards-on-a-ring over a notebook (it’s easier to throw in a gig bag!).

As I mentioned above, I’m leery of touching the computer during practice: I know that once I put down my guitar and start typing on a computer or phone, I’m doomed. It could be minutes, hours, or literally days until I get back to the guitar.

Luhman’s short but arbitrarily expandable ID scheme makes it easy to “hyperlink” between cards using just a short ID for each card.

Applying the idea

My Zettelkasten is organized into four major sections, separated by colored cards. I also put plastic cards at each end (to protect the cards and so that I can find the start!).

1. A single colored card at the very front contains my focus list. I scratch out and replace items on this card whenever I want. Whenever it becomes too cluttered to read, I replace it with a new one.

2. Next is a section with all my “general” notes I might create during a practice session that aren’t tied to a particular exercise. These might be thoughts for a blog article, song ideas, whatever. They get normal Zettelkasten IDs (e.g. 1, 1a, 1a1, 1b, 2, …) that can go arbitrarily deep or wide.

3. This is followed by a section with my notes on individual exercises. I have one card for each exercise in my library that I’ve actually practiced. The first card I create for an exercise has the same ID as the exercise itself (“RTxxxx”).

   I add notes to the appropriate card every time I practice the exercise. If I run out of room, I continue onto a new card. The ID for added cards is: exercise ID “/” additional hierarchy.

   For example, I have exercises RT4a • Major Arpeggios and RT4a1 • Major: GBE in my library. If I’d practiced both at least once, I’d have at least one card for each in my Zettelkasten: one with ID RT4a and one with ID RT4a1.

   If I ran out of room or wanted to add related ideas to card RT4a, I’d create a new card with ID RT4a/1 (note that this is a different ID than RT4a1). I’d then continue onto RT4a/2, etc. I could also branch downward if it made sense (say RT4a/2a).

4. Last up is a section of unsorted and blank cards. I always try to keep at least twenty or so blank cards available.

As suggested by abramdemski, I use the section of unsorted cards as a sort of recency buffer.

I always write new notes on the first blank card. New notes stay in that last section for a while until I choose to sort them into place, so recent notes tend to stay together.

Card layout

I don’t want to be too prescriptive since I’m still figuring this out for myself as well, but neither do I want to leave everything open ended, so here are my thoughts on the layout of each individual Zettel (note card):

1. Use “portrait” orientation and only write on one face of the cards. This will force you to write smaller and avoid being too verbose. Remember that you can always continue onto another card. I sought out blank index cards before realizing the “backs” of ruled index cards are usually blank!

2. Decide if you want to use color. Personally, I’ve decided against it. My eyes are bad, and I lose pens constantly. I want to use whatever writing implement I find first rather than depending on a multi-colored pen.

   If you do use color, I suspect it pays to be consistent. Maybe:

   • BLACK: most content
   • Green: IDs and links to things not on the card
   • Blue: metadata or secondary information
   • RED: errors, warnings, and corrections

3. Decide on the layout and “typography” for your cards:

   I always put each card’s ID in the upper right hand corner.

   I leave room on the upper left for “see also” links: other cards that link to this one. It’s often useful to provide bi-directional listings between two cards.

   If I run out of room on a card, I write a downward arrow (shorthand for “continued”) then the ID of the card I continue onto.

   I put a box around “hyperlinks” in any note text that refer to the IDs of other cards or exercises. I don’t put boxes around IDs in the upper corners or the bottom of the card.

4. Every card gets a unique id (e.g. 2b, 3c1, or 4h19b3 for a particularly deep and wide hierarchy).

   • Create new cards (with new IDs) whenever you practice a new exercise (or want to take a note on something unrelated to any particular exercise).

   • To continue thoughts that overflow an existing card, simply create a new one. For example, if I’d previously created a card with ID RT4b3/19 for practice exercise RT4b3, but ran out of room while writing notes, I’d continue my thoughts onto a new blank card, and label it RT4b3/20.

   • If you have a new but related thought thought you can add another level of depth in the hierarchy. Maybe RT4b3/19a.

Focus list

The focus list contains a list of one to five exercises that I want to practice for the next several days, weeks or months.

You may replace any item on your focus list whenever you want, but never allow yourself more than five things on the list (fewer is even better).

The five items on your focus list should be exercises that you can complete (but not necessarily master) within a single practice session. That doesn’t mean you can’t have higher level goals on your focus list!

I use longer-term goals as headings/categories on my focus list with individual exercises below each heading that I swap out frequently.

For example: I currently want to focus on timing (rhythm) and tunes (repertoire) over the next month or two, so I’ve currently got two items under the “timing” header, and one under “tunes”.

The focus list accomplishes three things:

• You’ll never stop practicing something without a conscious decision (as opposed to forgetting about it because you were distracted by something else).
• You’ll never be at a loss for what to practice.
• You’ll never feel overwhelmed because you’re studying too many things at once. If you’re working with a teacher, don’t be afraid to tell him or her that you don’t want to work on something new because your focus list is full!